Eduardo Andrés Acarón-Padilla

Originally from the coastal town of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, Eduardo is a dual PhD student in the departments of Comparative Literature and Central Eurasian Studies. His most recent project addresses these intersections in a comparative study of Christopher Marlowe’s and 'Abd-Allāh Hātifī’s depictions of the Central Asian emperor, Timūr, also known as Tamerlane. In April, Eduardo was one of six IU students invited to present at the Islamic Studies Program’s conference “Mapping the Landscapes of Islamic Studies at IU.” Eduardo’s paper, titled “'Abd-Allāh Hātifī’s and Christopher Marlowe’s Books of Timūr: Towards a Theory of Rhetoric” attempts to bridge the gaps between two poetic (and visual) portrayals of the life of Timūr. The paper argues that these portrayals allow us an opportunity to study the theoretical underpinnings of rhetorical practice in Early-Modern Persian and English literatures. Eduardo received the 2021-2022 Renaissance Studies Fellowship and was also recently awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the Islamic Studies Program to study second-year Arabic at Indiana University’s 2022 Summer Language Workshop. He hopes to learn Arabic to do research on Arabic-language philosophical, theoretical, and historical texts from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Eduardo wants to learn more about the reception and importance of these Arabic texts in fourteenth to seventeenth century Persian literary and intellectual history.

She was accepted into the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference in Middlebury, VT for this summer’s Manuscript Workshop. Rowena’s translation of Elena Poniatowska’s “The Seamstresses” was accepted for publication by Toad Press, and it’s scheduled to come out at the end of the summer. She continues to work on other translation projects as well and plans to dedicate herself to translation and editing once she leaves IU. She intends to continue residing in Albuquerque, NM.

Gabriela Lemos

This past year, Gabriela served as the Academic Coordinator for the students in comp lit and came up with creative ways to maintain friendship and camaraderie. As of this Spring, she completed her coursework for her Portuguese minor. On a personal note, she was very happy to be able to visit her family in Brazil in December for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic!

Margaret McLaughlin

Maggie spent most of her year completing her master's thesis, entitled "Hold Your Horses!: Animal Mastery and Overseas Exploration in Iron Age Greek Art and Homer’s Odyssey," and diving into her PhD coursework. She served as the co-chair of the Student Advisory Board and helped initiate the departmental teaching repository. She also works as a graduate tutor for Writing Tutorial Services and is presented at a pedagogy conference in May.

Meaghan Murphy

Meaghan has spent the past year perfecting and teaching her course on modern conspiracy theories, as well as preparing for her qualifying exams. She also received the newly established Newman Family fellowship. This summer, she'll head to Hangzhou, PRC to improve her language skills.

Alan Reiser

In the last academic year, Alan completed requirements for his Japanese pedagogy MA, and is looking forward to teaching Japanese again this summer before heading to Paris to represent our department at Nanterre next year. Beyond the classroom, Alan relearned typing after designing an ultra high-efficiency alternative to QWERTY, the Hands Down layout, and other professional-grade tools for wordies. His work is already used by dozens of others around the world in several languages and projected to save Alan more than the equivalent of 13 miles of walking on his fingertips annually while writing his dissertation about post-modern mythopoesis. The grandest narrative Alan aims to deconstruct is that of the aspirational grad student, as his daily video calls to his two granddaughters frame his personal mini-myth that he is important, at least to these two toddlers, even as they learn of the world through stories of his own academic odyssey.

Natasha Rubanova

Natasha presented her work on reportage writer Hanna Krall at an annual convention for scholars studying Slavic cultures (AATSEEL) in February. She also received the Polish Century Club Exploratory Research Fellowship. The fellowship will allow her to travel to Poland this August where she will conduct research on Polish documentary fil of the Thaw period and lead a panel at the Visible Evidence Conference at the University of Gdansk.